Peace Plan In Boulder Bans Sofas On Porches

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The college tradition of lounging on old couches in the open air may become a mere memory here, at least if students want to avoid jail.

Appalled by several small but destructive disturbances near the University of Colorado in the last few years, events in which inebriated students invariably stole couches off porches and burned them, Boulder officials last week approved an ordinance that forbids keeping upholstered furniture outside.

The measure, effective Aug. 1, applies only to University Hill, a residential area near the campus where the worst of the disturbances occurred. Even as the council was debating the measure, a couch went up in flames a few blocks away.

''We're going to get drunk, we're going to party, we're going to do what we do -- you can't stop it,'' said Scott MacMaster, 22, who graduated with a business degree this month. ''They're trying to improve the image of the school, but it's always been known as a party school.''

The ordinance in Boulder, where more than 100 couches have been torched since 1996, mirrors laws in other campus towns, including Fort Collins, Colo., Normal, Ill., and Blacksburg, Va., as well as cities in which aesthetics was the primary concern, including Wilson, N.C.

The Colorado Legislature this month approved a bill that requires colleges and universities to suspend for one year any student convicted of disturbance-related crimes.

''The issues here in Boulder between the city and the university are not dramatically different than in any other college town,'' said city manager Ronald Secrist, who has worked in three other cities with universities.

Campus disturbances generally take the form of celebrations of sporting victories. Occasionally, the catalyst is a defeat. ''You've got bands of inebriated, marauding men with a lot of testosterone and a lot of alcohol, who feel they're anonymous in this mob situation, scouring for what's burnable,'' Mr. Secrist said.

But many students are not impressed by the Boulder ordinance, which carries penalties of 90 days in jail and fines of up to $1,000.

''It seems stupid that they would try to stop riots by taking couches off porches,'' said Jessica Sufit, 20, a junior who was hit in the forehead by part of a lamppost during a Dec. 1 uprising after Colorado beat Texas in a championship football game.

''People are going to be destructive, especially when there's 1,000 drunk teenagers or 20-year-olds,'' said Ms. Sufit, who had a stuffed armchair on her porch. ''They'll knock down lampposts or burn trees.''

The measure was first floated by city officials more than a year ago after complaints by nonstudent residents of the Hill. ''We live in a city that's very, very vulnerable to fire,'' Lisa Spalding, a film historian who lives on the Hill, said. ''In 2001, some of the students turned a car over and there was gas running down the street toward a burning couch. Then they tried to stop the firemen from getting to it.''

Fire Chief Larry Donner, who oversees 99 firefighters in a town of about 100,000 people, 26,000 of them students, said the fires have ''almost become a college sport.''

''What we're looking at is a pretty simple approach -- you take away the fuel and you reduce the potential for the arsonists,'' he said.

Since 1997, eight disturbances have occurred here, resulting in dozens of arrests and injuries to more than 20 officers, Police Chief Mark Beckner said. In the Dec. 1 melee last year, police arrested 25 youths, 14 of them students.

''The students who act violently are a small minority who are alienated from the others,'' Rob Smoke, a community activist who is the host of a radio talk show here, said. At last week's council meeting, Mr. Smoke asked that the couch ordinance be tabled, but it passed 6 to 3.

Chris Holloway, a 40-year-old scientist at the Institute for Standards and Technology here, contends the law is discriminatory. ''If you can afford brand new lawn furniture, you can have it on your porch,'' he said, but not ''if the thing you have is a ratty old couch.''

Mr. Holloway, who leads a group called Citizens' Right to Air Couches and Upholstered Furniture, told the council that students at universities in Indiana and Arizona had roasted cars and not couches.

''I suggested to the city,'' he said, ''that if they wanted to ban automobiles too, then I would be all in favor of that. They just laughed.''

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